Reluctantly Home(41)

Jez sat up a little. ‘She’s hot!’ he said with a grin.

Pip rolled her eyes. ‘Is that it? No other reason why you’re marrying her?’

Jez smiled fondly. ‘Nope!’ he said.

There it was again, that rakish sense of humour that she used to love so much.

‘Seriously, though,’ he continued. ‘She’s great. That perfect combination of beauty and brains. She manages one of the big hotels in town. In fact, she pretty much runs the whole chain. Her boss is crap. She covers for him all the time. And she’s the youngest out of all of them.’

He looked so proud as he spoke and, even though the slightly peculiar twinge of jealousy was still hovering at the back of her mind, Pip was pleased for him. Unlike her, he deserved to have some happiness.

‘Have you got any photos?’ she asked.

Jez fished his phone out of his coat pocket, typed in his password and then scrolled through his photographs, rejecting one or two until he came to one he seemed to think would do.

‘There you go. My beautiful girl,’ he said, looking fondly at his phone before handing it over.

Pip looked down at the screen. Teresa was attractive but not really beautiful, and Pip felt a sense of relief. Having established that her ‘rival’ wasn’t a supermodel, she allowed herself to consider her more carefully and concluded that she looked like a nice enough woman, although something about the way she held her head suggested that she, too, had some of that inner confidence Pip had come across at bar school. Well, that was fine. At the end of the day, Teresa was a hotel manager in a small English town, and she was a leading human rights barrister at one of the best chambers in London. Not that it was a competition, of course.

And then again, could she really make that claim for herself any more? She was no longer sure of who she was, and she certainly didn’t have the right to look down on Teresa, who appeared to have far more things going in her favour than Pip could currently lay claim to.

She handed the phone back to Jez. ‘She looks lovely,’ she said quietly. ‘I know you’ll both be very happy.’

Suddenly she couldn’t bear it for a minute more, the maintenance of the facade that she’d built up around herself. She needed to be on her own.

Looking at her watch, she feigned surprise. ‘Goodness, is that the time?’ she said. ‘I promised Mum I’d help with supper. Could I have that lift now, please?’

Jez finished his drink in one swift gulp and they headed back to the van, chatting about the things that had changed on Southwold High Street since they were children and the things that had remained resolutely the same. This felt like much safer territory to Pip. The past. Even though she had spent so long running from it, it suddenly felt a much more secure place to be than the present.





24


Pip needed a stamp for a birthday card. This in itself was surprising. She had no idea how many of her friends’ birthdays had rolled by whilst she had been at the farm. Birthdays had been the last thing on her mind as she struggled to hold herself together. But then, out of the blue, she had remembered that in a couple of days it would be a friend’s thirtieth and she had bought a card in her lunch hour. This felt like a normal thing to do, the kind of little chore that she would have sorted without thinking before the accident. And now, here she was doing it again. Was this progress?

She had fished in her purse for a stamp and found one of Dominic’s business cards. He had written the phone number of a restaurant he’d wanted to try on the back. She had been going to book them a table and had slipped the card in her purse to deal with later. But there had been no later.

Seeing his name pulled her up short. It was a shock, and she hadn’t been prepared for it. In the few days since his visit, she had tried not to think about him, worried that it would make her feel sad or, more likely, that she would realise she didn’t feel anything at all. She wasn’t sure which of the two options would be worse, so she had just avoided thinking. Avoiding thought was a skill she had perfected over recent months – keeping busy so nothing unwelcome could creep into her head.

Now, though, as she stood there holding something Dominic had once touched, she couldn’t help but bring him to mind. It wasn’t that she missed him, exactly – she probably wouldn’t have spoken to him since his visit anyway as their contact had dwindled to almost nothing recently – but there was a sadness there that he was gone, that that part of her life was over. But it was like she was in a theatre watching someone playing her life out on the stage in front of her, rather than living through it herself. Objectively, it was a very great shame that her relationship with a man she thought she loved had broken down and come to nothing, but it felt as if it was happening to someone else. She could see that it was upsetting and that she should feel dejected and disconsolate, but actually she didn’t feel anything. The wiring inside her just wasn’t joined up properly any more. Maybe it never would be again.

She had extracted a stamp and stuck it firmly in the corner of the envelope. Then she dropped the business card in the bin.

Later, she and her mother were working side by side in the kitchen preparing the evening meal. As a teenager, Pip had prompted many an argument by complaining about the gender-stereotypical way her parents ran the farm. Now, though, she could see that even though her father did labour in the fields whilst her mother tended to hearth and home, this arrangement actually served them very well. They were a team. Her father could not work as well as he did on the farm without her mother providing him with hearty meals, clean clothes and a safe, warm home to come back to, and without the money her father earned, her mother would have to look for work elsewhere, which would prevent her from running the house. On top of that, each of them was happy with their allocated tasks and wouldn’t have wanted to do either what the other did, or, indeed, anything else. Gender-defining though the arrangement was, their lives were symbiotic, each one vital to the well-being of the other. It was a true partnership.